Stages of techno

I am listening to two lives, both from Carl Cox, both at Tribehouse Neuss in Düsseldorf. The first one is allegedly from the mid-1990s and sounds very much like it: I can hear track sI have already listened to in mixes by Jeff Mills. I can hear acid tracks, and a lot of tracks that are also featured on the F.A.C.T. volumes. The second mix is dated 30th April 2008, and has almost nothing really interesting. It sounds very much like some of that commercial electro crap that you can listen to pretty much everywhere. I have no enthusiasm for that second stage of techno -- I believe the best stuff is now in minimal techno (Ritchie Hawtin) and in hard techno (Chris Liebing, Frank Kvitta). Technasia and their friends (Joris Voorn, Renato Cohen) stay on top of my all-time list.

Remus v. Wittekind

Some of the best hard techno at the moment. Check at 2:20:

Alphabet City

What came before Hardtechno vol.3, the excellent mix by Kvitta? Discogs tells me here and there. From what I can tell from the tracklist, it's the same kind of hard techno, I cannot wait to find them!

Frank Kvitta

My baptism to the Church of Hard Techno Wisdom was performed by Technasia back in the days of “Hydra” (see my first post on this blog), but the archbishop of the discipline is definitely DJ Rush. And like the Pope, DJ Rush is always right. Which is why you have to listen to Frank Kvitta.

Kvitta gave one of his tapes to DJ Rush in a night club, and Rush liked it enough to invite him to release an EP on his label Kne' Deep. This should be enough to throw any hard techno amateur to his local music dispatch with the right spelling of ‘kvitta’ written on the back of his hand with a thick black pen.

As expected, his stuff (not everything though) is amazingly good hard techno. The first video was apparently made by one of Frank Kvitta's friends, Mario Ranieri.



The second video features Pet Duo, another rising star in hard techno.



Another video by Marco Ranieri, taken in a Hungarian club in Budapest. What is simply über-cool about this video is that it opens with the best track from the Donnie Darko soundtrack by Michael Andrews, one of my favourite ambient works.



Update: so Kvitta is my best pick for this summer. Hardtechno vol. 3 is wonderful: it wakes me up. It's how spending most of my time looking for contemporary classic musicians has sent me straight back to 130 BPM hard techno, the closest to hardcore I have ever been since an old apocryphal mix by Jeff Mills. The tracklist is going to provide me with new material for months.